Opinion recap: Blunt memo to the DA

Posted Tue, January 10th, 2012 4:10 pm by Lyle Denniston

Analysis

Using brevity as a blunt instrument, the Supreme Court spent very little effort Tuesday in ordering the New Orleans district attorney’s office to provide a new trial in a murder case because prosecutors — using a tactic several times challenged before the Justices — had failed to hand over evidence that could have helped in defending a murder suspect. In a spare four-page opinion, less than two pages of which were legal reasoning, the Court nullified the conviction of Juan Smith of New Orleans for an alleged role in the murder of five people in 1995.

Ironically, that murder occurred in the same year in which the Supreme Court began a prolonged effort of monitoring whether the New Orleans prosecutors were fulfilling their constitutional duty (under the Supreme Court’s 1963 decision in Brady v. Maryland) to share with defense lawyers all of the evidence they had which might help the accused. While most of those rulings had gone against the prosecutors, a highly controversial one — the decision last March in Connick v. Thompson — had overturned a $14 million jury verdict in the case of a man who had been wrongly convicted of armed robbery, and had spent 18 years in prison, 14 of which were on death row.

The Justices, in fact, had granted review of Juan Smith’s case last June, even as they were putting together the 5-4 decision in Connick v. Thompson. In some sense, the grant had the appearance of a new attempt to impose some firmer obligations on the New Orleans prosecutors to obey the Brady mandate. The case thus had been watched closely to see whether, in fact, that kind of message would go out to that office. It did, in what looked very much like a brusque rebuke.

The fact that the Court’s lead opinion — only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented — was written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., added to its authority and raised its visibility. While the opinion virtually brushed off the prosecutors’ defense of Smith’s conviction, Thomas (the author of the majority opinion last Term in the Thompson case) used almost five times as much space (19 pages) as Roberts had, seeking to demolish Smith’s challenge. The dissenting opinion actually focused more on claims by Smith’s lawyers than on what the Chief Justice’s opinion had said.

The Court’s main opinion focused entirely on one of Smith’s challenges: the New Orleans prosecutors’ refusal to hand over to Smith’s lawyers some notes that a New Orleans detective, the lead investigator in the case, had made about statements made to him by Larry Boatner — the only witness at Smith’s trial for murder that linked Smith to the crime. Those notes, the Chief Justice wrote, conflict with statements that Boatner had made on the witness stand identifying Smith as the shooter. At one point in the notes, the detective said that Boatner could not identify any of the perpetrators of the murder.

Briefly recalling the evidence-sharing obligation that the Brady decision had created, the Chief Justice’s opinion said the sole issue before the Court was whether Boatner’s undisclosed statements were a significant factor (“material to”) the conviction of Smith. Running quickly over that question and the Boatner statements, the opinion concluded that those statements were “plainly material.” In a brief rebuttal to Thomas’s dissent, the Chief Justice said that, while there were reasons why the jury might have discounted what Boatner had said if it had heard that evidence, the prosecution had not shown that the jury would have done so.

While most of the Thomas dissent was an exhaustive review of the details of the evidence against Smith, the Justice did imply that the Court had not fulfilled its review obligations. The Court, he said, had declined to “consider all of the facts” and had made flawed assumptions about the evidence it did consider.

Merits Case Pages and Archives

The court issued additional orders from the December 2 conference on Monday. The court did not grant any new cases or call for the views of the solicitor general in any cases. On Tuesday, the court released its opinions in three cases. The court also heard oral arguments on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The calendar for the December sitting is available on the court's website. On Friday the justices met for their December 9 conference; Honeycutt v. United States.

Major Cases

Gloucester County School Board v. G.G.(1) Whether courts should extend deference to an unpublished agency letter that, among other things, does not carry the force of law and was adopted in the context of the very dispute in which deference is sought; and (2) whether, with or without deference to the agency, the Department of Education's specific interpretation of Title IX and 34 C.F.R. § 106.33, which provides that a funding recipient providing sex-separated facilities must “generally treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity,” should be given effect.

Bank of America Corp. v. City of Miami(1) Whether, by limiting suit to “aggrieved person[s],” Congress required that a Fair Housing Act plaintiff plead more than just Article III injury-in-fact; and (2) whether proximate cause requires more than just the possibility that a defendant could have foreseen that the remote plaintiff might ultimately lose money through some theoretical chain of contingencies.

Moore v. Texas(1) Whether it violates the Eighth Amendment and this Court’s decisions in Hall v. Florida and Atkins v. Virginia to prohibit the use of current medical standards on intellectual disability, and require the use of outdated medical standards, in determining whether an individual may be executed.

Pena-Rodriguez v. ColoradoWhether a no-impeachment rule constitutionally may bar evidence of racial bias offered to prove a violation of the Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury.

Conference of December 9, 2016

FTS USA, LLC v. Monroe (1) Whether the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Due Process Clause permit a collective action to be certified and tried to verdict based on testimony from a small subset of the putative plaintiffs, without either any statistical or other similarly reliable showing that the experiences of those who testified are typical and can reliably be extrapolated to the entire class, or a jury finding that the testifying witnesses are representative of the absent plaintiffs; and (2) whether the procedure for determining damages upheld by the Sixth Circuit, in which the district court unilaterally determined damages without any jury finding, violates the Seventh Amendment.

Overton v. United States Whether, consistent with this Court's Brady v. Maryland jurisprudence, a court may require a defendant to demonstrate that suppressed evidence “would have led the jury to doubt virtually everything” about the government's case in order to establish that the evidence is material.

Turner v. United States (1) Whether, under Brady v. Maryland, courts may consider information that arises after trial in determining the materiality of suppressed evidence; and (2) whether, in a case where no physical evidence inculpated petitioners, the prosecution's suppression of information that included the identification of a plausible alternative perpetrator violated petitioners' due process rights under Brady.